Study Challenges Link Between Salt and Heart Disease
May-07-2011

The prevailing wisdom that high salt intake raises cardiovascular risks is being challenged by a new European study that suggests the opposite.
The Polish and Belgian researchers acknowledge that all of the study volunteers were younger and white, and that may have skewed the results.
Analyzing urine sodium tests from 3,681 participants with no previous cardiovascular disease, the scientists found that lower sodium excretion was associated with an increased risk of heart-related deaths and higher sodium excretion was not linked to increased risks for high blood pressure or complications from heart disease.
The study is published in the May 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Study author Dr. Katarzyna Stolarz-Skrzypek said she and her colleagues were surprised at the results, but noted they mirrored previous findings by U.S. researchers in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES).
The nearly 3,000 participants in the U.S. studies, however, had been instructed to avoid high-salt foods for four to five days before sodium excretion measurements were taken. Participants in Stolarz-Skrzypek's study were not asked to cut salt intake beforehand.
"Our findings do not support the current recommendations of a generalized and indiscriminate reduction of salt intake at the population level," said Stolarz-Skrzypek, a cardiologist at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Krakow, Poland. "We believe that the consumers should be informed about risk related to low- or high-salt diet and be free to choose the consumed food. However, our findings do not negate the blood pressure-lowering effects of a dietary salt reduction in hypertensive patients."

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